Réparer
by DallaLuna
Summary: //HIATUS\\ Esmée, devastated by an unrequited love, runs away from home. In the thick of the forest, she happens upon an enchanted castle and its master: a cynical beast. This creature has known heartache of his own, and the pair form an unlikely...
1. Introduction

**_Réparer_**

* * *

_Introduction_

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I ran.

For some time I heard his voice, perplexedly repentant and desperately insistent, shouting my name over and over: _Esmée, Esmeé, Esmée_. Soon enough it was nothing but a distant whisper—faint and dreamlike—fading slowly and surely into the inexorable drone of the forest. Panting, stumbling, tear-stained, and runny-nosed, I pressed forward, exhausted and miserable, and yet driven by the juvenile impulse to get as far from him and that mortification as I could.

I should have known that there was no easy way of escaping it. I think I did, though I was too shaken to think rationally about anything. Even as I was sprinting shakily through the verdant forest, I felt the unshakable weight of it all. How could I possibly ignore it? It—_all_ of that horrible scene—hovered precariously in the back of my mind, waiting for the moment to strike.

And of course it _did_, the moment my legs give out beneath me and I tumbled clumsily onto the damp forest bed of rotting leaves and moist earth. I did not move. I merely laid there tremulously, unable (or unwilling) to tear myself from wallowing in the multitudinous seas of self-loathing and regret.

His eyes, dark and disbelieving, blinking at me abjectly… as if there was nothing in the world more repulsive to him than what I had said… _Mon dieu_! Had his voice ever sounded so terribly strained? So wavering in its deep and throaty timbre? _"Esmée, I cannot… _Désolé_… I-I don't know what to say. It's just… _Je ne sais pas_. I… You're so young…"_

So young… and _stupid_, yes. Dirt, sweat, and tears coalesced ingloriously. I hiccoughed wretchedly and struggled for breath. _Oui… que stupid__é__e!_ Who but a child would throw such a self-indulgent tantrum? Who but a child would run away? Who but a child would be so delusional?

It was juvenile, perhaps, but I could hardly stomach the thought of facing them all again. It would be thankless—_et_ _très cruelle_—to leave without saying goodbye, or "_Merci"_, or "_Vous j'aime beaucoup"._ It would be terrible to never tell them that they were the only family I'd ever known.

But I could not bear to go back, knowing that he would only ever say "_mon petit ch__è__rie_" in that maddeningly paternal tone. Did he know what a torture it was? Could he possibly understand how near I was to screaming when he sang out those words with a condescending grin? Those very same words might easily be whispered tenderly between lovers and sealed with a kiss. Perhaps he never thought of that. I could not help it. It was all I _could_ think.

But I would never be anything more to him than the child I'd been when we met. The timid five-year-old who smiled only for him, who trailed behind him tirelessly and trustily, who was so hopelessly enamored with him that she dreamt of his face at night and longed for the day when she would be old and pretty enough for him to love with… _Bon sang!_

No wonder he saw me the same. I was old enough by _my_ reckoning, but I had not changed at all.

'_So young_'? _Certainement!_ As far as he was concerned, I might as well be five!

I would not go back. I could not.

"_Je t'aime_, Aristide," I murmured into the dark heart of the forest, wiping off my face with a quivering sigh. "_Plus que tout le monde, et toujours_."

And so I climbed unsteadily to my feet and began to walk, not knowing where it was I was headed.

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	2. Chapter One

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**Chapter 1**

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Esmée did not know quite how long she walked before curling up at the foot of a primordial pine and falling asleep. She numbly noticed, only just before succumbing to sleep, that the sky above was pale and the moon low. In hindsight, she supposed the seeming centuries she spent wandering aimlessly over knotted roots, moss covered stones, and the supple forest bed were in fact no more than nine or ten hours. 

But those hours were long and horrible, and she would not have been sorry if she never saw another tree in her life.

Esmée was only vaguely aware of the stirrings and rustlings of the creatures in the forest as she rambled, and was far beyond caring. She never went alone into the _Forêt de Fontainevert_ for fear of attack by wild creature, however preposterous that seemed (or however preposterous Isidore said it was). Isidore seemed to find humor in most anything that Esmée did or said.

But she did not think of him, or of Marius, or of Célestine. And Esmée did not think of Aristide, either.

Her physical maladies easily overtook her emotional anguish at the fore of her mind. Aristide's hand-me-down boots tore at the back of her heels and scraped at the sides of her poor toes. Her back was sore (either from hours upon hours of walking or her steadily slumping carriage), her legs and arms heavy, and her eyes clouded. Esmée could not find it in herself to care about being loved, or those she loved whom she had so rashly left behind.

She cared about rest, and part of her would not have been sorry to sleep forever. Eternal sleep and death were not analogous to her during those half-witted moments. (Or perhaps they were hours… _va savoir_?) She didn't know what propelled her forward, but necessity stopped Esmée at last.

So she slept, and dreamt. She remembered very little of it when she woke the next afternoon, but from the haze of all the convoluted happenings, Esmée could recall Célestine casting her tarot cards. L'étoile was set upright on the table. The older woman smiled, as if that one card revealed all that would be in Esmée's life.

Esmée woke and squinted up through the canopy of leaves and blinding sunshine to the brilliantly blue sky, irritated that she dreamt at all.

Her fortune had been read many times over the course of her life, grudgingly, for she had adapted Isidore's cynicism when it came to the supposed art of Divination. But she knew—through prolonged exposure—that _L'étoile_ meant renewal and hope.

'A most excellent card,' Célestine always said, nodded her head of silvery curls knowingly.

But Esmée wanted none of her soothsaying, real or imagined. She scrambled to her feet furiously and marched onward (_nord, sud, est, ou oest_, she didn't know) mulling over how pathetic she was. She would not, she vowed, fall for any of her own mind's traitorous tricks.

Certainly it was lovely to hope that Aristide would come after her, or to hope that she would somehow find some lovely new home to call her own. But it was folly, and Esmée felt that she really deserved no such fortune.

She had left without thinking—without _really_ thinking, at least. But that afternoon found Esmée drowning in the depths of staggering self-realization.

To be in full possession of one's faculties is both a blessing and a curse.

"Magnifique," she grumbled, pausing to trample a flourishing fern under her boot heel. (Seeing the supple green leaves tear filled her with a sense of morbid satisfaction.) "I left home, I didn't say good-bye, and I didn't even take anything to eat!"

The lattermost seemed the most grievous of all her offenses. She was famished.

Esmée, knowing no other option, trekked onward, and did her best to forget herself. There was an agreeable chill in the air despite the sun's brilliance, which made the journey somewhat palatable.

She could not, however, lose herself in the pleasantness of the day. The sheer magnitude of the _Forêt de Fontainevert_ was beginning to wear on her. It was dizzying, humbling, and terrifying all at once to be lost in this massive woodland with no clue of how to escape its verdurous grasp.

Of all the things in the world to omit from her education, Isidore had decided that geography was dispensable. Granted, it was hardly intellectually stimulating (which Isidore valued above all else), but it would have been practical.

"_Didactic fool_," Esmée groused, grimacing sourly. "I shall never find my way out of this cursed place, and it's entirely your fault!"

Of course it was not even remotely his fault.

And beyond the fact that the omnipresent trees were grating on her nerves, Esmée realized she had no reason to want to escape the forest. The elusive 'world out there' had very little appeal to her, though she was admittedly relying on it its benevolence—_in spite_ of all the unflattering accounts she had heard.

Marius, Isidore, and Célestine lived in the forest because they despised that very world: because it was needlessly violent (by Marius' figuring), dogmatic (by Célestine's), and vapid (in Isidore's less-than-humble opinion). Aristide and Esmée had happened upon this unlikely trio as an adolescent runaway and a luckless orphan, respectively. Perhaps, because he was older, Aristide was never fully indoctrinated into the occult of distaste. He longed to see the world.

Esmée did not. And yet there she was, rambling off into the great unknown, whilst he remained at home.

"_Pauvre _Aristide," Esmée whispered sadly. "If only you were here and I there! Then you would be happy. I would be miserable still, but less miserable…"

Thoughts of Aristide flooded her head, as lovely and sweet and painful as ever. Or so they were at first. But the more Esmée thought on it, the more disgusted she became with herself.

"Aristide is fine. He does not need me—_clearly_—and I doubt he needs or wants _my_ pity. He deserves it, though, for being the object of affection for such a pathetic creature as I," she muttered.

Esmée found herself wishing that Marius were there to hold her as he had when she was a child frightened by howling winds or fearful dreams. She loved Isidore and Célestine dearly, but her heart ached at this moment only for his silent, surly comfort.

Marius would understand. He had always had the bearing of one who had known some great, tragic love and nevertheless bore his burden nobly.

It must have been decades since he and she—the woman he loved, once upon a time—were torn apart. Decades spent not wallowing in self-pity, but helping others: the weak, the lonely, the persecuted.

Thankless abandonment was how she repaid his unfathomable kindness.

Esmée's stomach knotted, and her ravenous hunger was a thing of the past. She doubted that she could have eaten a bite, even if there were a banquet before her.

Night was falling once again as she plodded onward. _Les étoiles_ shone vividly overhead, lanterns of unwavering light in the indigo sky above. Emblems of hope, Célestine would say.

Esmée regarded them bitterly for a moment before realizing they were just that.

_Renewed hope, indeed!_ It was so deliciously ironic that even she could not help but laugh.

"How thick of me! Why had I not thought of this before?" Esmée managed to gasp between paroxysms of giggles, pointing a trembling finger to the brilliant North Star above. "There is Polaris! Bless you, Isidore, for teaching me Astronomy! And I had thought you a useless windbag, hadn't I? That is north, so left is west. And west, I think, is where Marius said he came from!"

She staggered back against a tree, her hysterical laughter growing less mirthful and more desperate with each breath. She laughed these empty stilted laughs for a moment longer, fearful of what might happen if she stopped.

Nothing did. Esmée did not cry, as she worried she would. She simply stood, feeling neither happy nor hopeless.

"I suppose I owe it to you not to be weak, Marius," Esmée whispered with a half-hearted smile. "It would be a waste if I were to give up now, after all the time and effort you invested in me, _non_?"

An owl trilled '_Tu-whit, tu-who!_', which she took as a sign of Marius' approval.

So Esmée headed west.

* * *

**A/N: **Not titillating, I know, but I felt a bit of character background needed to be established before delving into the plotline. Which, for the record, is less BatB retelling as BatB What-If. But you'll see all that in time.

Apologies for the time it took to update, and the less-than-stellar chapter. [Insert Numerous Excuses About College Applications, Hecticness of Life, and Difficulty of School Here. I've begun the next chapter, which I already like a great deal more than this one (if only because it's got actual BatB things going on).

Also, there's significantly less French and the change to a third-person narrative. Certain interludes will be in first-person, but I decided I'd like to do a 3rd person story. And so I am.

Here are the definitions for the few interspersed French words/phrases:

_Va savoir_?--Who knows?

_nord, sud, est, ou oest--_north, south, east, or west

_L'étoile/Les étoiles--_the star / the stars


End file.
